Re: [cdt-dev] Adding autotools support to core builder

[Doug Schaefer <dschaefer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Actually, let me be clearer, When I say IDE I mean QNX Momentics, not the Eclipse C/C++ IDE. I have no intention of actually removing MBS until it is a full replacement for everyone and then only if no one objects. Mind you, right now, we have no maintainer of MBS, so if someone does object, I would expect them to take over maintenance of it 😉.

More comments below.

Doug

> -----Original Message-----
> From: cdt-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:cdt-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx]
> On Behalf Of Christian Walther
> Sent: Friday, September 29, 2017 11:59 AM
> To: CDT General developers list. <cdt-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx>
> Subject: Re: [cdt-dev] Adding autotools support to core builder
> 
> Doug Schaefer <dschaefer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > At the end of the day, my objective is to be able to flush MBS and have an
> IDE that only has Core Build.
> 
> At the end of that day, will Core Build also have replaced the functionality of
> MBS, i.e. figuring out what needs building and how, calling compilers and
> whatever? So far I have been under the impression that Core Build was just
> intended to drive an external build system like CMake or autotools, but not
> to build by itself. And accordingly I haven't really followed Core Build progress
> because I thought I wasn't interested in it because at Indel, we do not have
> an external build system but rely on MBS to do the building for us (by
> generating makefiles and calling make, but I don't think we insist on that, we
> treat it as an implementation detail). We don't want our customers to have
> to write CMake.list or Makefile.am or anything like that, that should be taken
> care of by the IDE.

I think it would be cool if someone ported MBS over to Core Build. MBS started out to provide a similar user experience to Visual Studio, and as it turned out year later, Xcode. I can see that still being a requirement for some.

> Does the Arduino stuff use Core Build yet? Maybe I should take another look
> at that, because last time I used it, it seemed to offer that experience.

Yes, Arduino is on Core Build. It's a bit of strange beast though since there are no build settings for it. Everything is pretty statically defined by the metadata files shipped with the board SDKs.

> > BTW, both Xcode and Visual Studio have launch bars.
> 
> Going off on a tangent, and the Xcode launch bar has recently annoyed me -
> all I wanted in my static library project was to generate a debug build and a
> release build of my static library for different platforms, I did not want to
> launch or debug or profile anything. I couldn't achieve that without creating
> arcane "schemes", because the choice between debug and release
> configurations was hidden behind the lanuch bar's build/run/test verbs. But
> maybe that's just because I hadn't used Xcode for a couple of years.

I just added the concept of a Generic Target for Core Build projects that simply set the OS and Arch to allow for the automatic Toolchain selection to work. That should be simpler than Xcode schemes. And I imagine there are other ways to make it even simpler. But at the end of the day, build configurations need to know the toolchain.

> I am actually vaguely interested in the Eclipse launch bar, because we have
> implemented something similar at Indel and might want to transition to the
> launch bar in the long term. I don't spend a lot of my time on Eclipse/CDT so
> these things have been on the back burner, but I was recently working on
> updating our IDE from Mars to Oxygen and so they have caught my attention
> again.

Cool. That's why I'm bringing this up now to encourage everyone to take another look at the Launch Bar. I am putting together a slide package for the deep dive at EclipseCon and will share that with the rest of the community right after that.

>  -Christian
> 
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